OnTheRoadwithJ-Lo

Engineer Rick Camp is a man with plenty of frequent flyer miles. When your list of FOH mixing credits includes the likes of Madonna, Beyoncé, Anita Baker, Natalie Cole, Destiny’s Child, Chris Brown and Burt Bacharach, you’ve been around the block a few times. We recently caught up with Rick in Australia during Jennifer Lopez’s Dance Again World Tour. Camp, who had previously worked FOH with J-Lo, was brought in again to mix the European, Australian and Asian legs of the tour last September, which — possibly just for additional airline miles — concluded with two dates in San Juan, Puerto Rico, followed by hopping back to central Asia for a couple shows in Turkmenistan on December 28.

Like many sound engineers, Camp had a musical background, having played trumpet for about 10 years back in the 1970s, and then attending the Berklee College of Music in the 1980s. “But then I realized all the horn bands — like Earth, Wind & Fire, Kool & the Gang and Chicago — had kind of gone away. So I made a change and went into engineering,” Camp recalls.

“Engineering was always something I did with the local bands that I played for, but it just came natural to me. I made the move from Cincinnati — where I’m from — to L.A. At that time, I had a gig with a national recording group called The Whispers. From then on, I kept at it, and ended up mixing for Earth Wind & Fire around ‘94. I mixed them for about five years. Then I went out with Madonna, Beyoncé, Destiny’s Child and so on. Now I’m back out on the road with J-Lo.”

The Team, The System

Clair Brothers is the sound company on theDance Again World Tour, with support from Sydney-based Jands Audio for the Australian/Asian legs. Camp was brought onboard last September with the European dates starting at the Crystal Hall Arena in Baku, Azerbaijan, and joined monitor mixer Vish Wadi, a first-call veteran who’s worked with top names like Shakira, Enrique Iglesias, Rihanna, Miley Cyrus, Babyface and Sting.

The house system was all d&b audiotechnik. “I’ve been using a large d&b rig, with J8 and J12 line array cabinets and a couple subwoofers — in fact, quite a few of them,” says Camp, who became a d&b fan several years ago. “I’m using all the flavors of subwoofers they make with a couple of the J-INFRA triple-21s, the double-18 B2s (which are my main subs) and I’m flying 12 of the triple-18 J-SUBs. In terms of bass, this combination makes everything even and smooth — there are no holes or gaps in the LF coverage as you walk around the arena, which can happen if you don’t have enough sub boxes.”

Coming in halfway through a world tour is hardly time to make big changes, but Camp did add his own tweaks, mostly in terms of drum mics. “I like these new Lewitt Audio mics, a company from Austria. Most people had never heard of them but were amazed when they heard them — the drummer was totally amazed. I’m using the Lewitt DTP 340 on toms and the double-capsule Lewitt DTP 640 on kick. The overheads are AKG 414s, which [monitor engineer] Vish Wadi really likes using. There’s also a Shure KSM 137 doubling on ride cymbal, another on hi-hat and two KSM 137s are also used for bottom snare mics, with SM57s on top of both the snares.”

Camp is mixing on his longtime console of choice, an Avid VENUE Profile. “I always owned a studio while living in L.A., and I got into Pro Tools, when Digidesign/Avid came out with the Mix Plus system, where you could record 64 tracks,” Camp recalls. “So back around ‘95 I got heavily involved into the Pro Tools craze, and rode it all the way out to where it is now. But I was always doing the live thing as well, and one day I got to use the Digidesign console at a one-off. The sound company on the gig was demoing it, but I thought, ‘there’s no way this could work live.’ To my surprise, they really had it together; the sound quality was great, it didn’t crash and, from then on, I was requesting that board. It got to the point where my wife and I actually bought a 96-channel VENUE board for rental purposes. I would of course use it whenever I could on my own gigs.”

On the Dance Again World Tour, “I’ve been running about 56 input channels — or around 62 if I include talkback mics and all that stuff — which is a bit short these days,’ says Camp. “And the band’s not small, with two keyboard players, a percussionist and a drummer, bass player, guitar player and two background singers.”

The Money Channel

Jennifer sings into custom Sennheiser MMD 935 cardioid condenser capsule heads on SKM 2000-Series wireless handheld bodies that are blinged-out with gold plating. During certain parts of the show, she switches to a Crown CM 311 headset mic. From there, “all of her vocal mic inputs go into Avalon VT-737sp mono tube channel strips, so I bypass the console mic preamps and EQs for her channels. For reverb, I use the Reverb One [stock Avid plug-in] from the desk, although in an arena you don’t need much reverb.”

Camp has been using Sonnox plug-ins since 2000, first in the studio, and now they’ve become part of his virtual outboard rack at FOH. “In the studio, I used the Reverb, Dynamics, SuprEsser and the Oxford EQ. I always liked how accurate the EQ was, and finally it kind of hit me to use it to tune the PA. That way, I could use it instead of the Dolby Lake EQ, which most sound companies use. It’s just as accurate, and I could save it with my show files for later recall. That’s what led to me using it live. On this current tour, I use it on the most important thing — to EQ the main speaker system. It’s so accurate for tuning a PA that I can totally rely on it.”

The Oxford EQ also is called in on J-Lo’s vocal. “The settings change every night, depending on the room and on her voice. I can even shift it around on the fly for each song using the ‘Drag Handles’ option, depending on how she’s on the mic and so on. In addition to the vocals, I use it on some of the drums and bass and anything that’s critical to the show. There’s nothing else out there that is more accurate than this,” Camp explains.

Every show is multitracked to Pro Tools 10 HD. But beyond the archival function, Camp also employs the VENUE console’s Virtual Soundcheck function every day to tune the PA using a Sonnox EQ and Waves L3 limiters on all the outputs. “I’ll use an analyzer to see what going on,” adds Camp, “but I tune the PA by ear. It’s all about making sure her vocal mic sounds good in that room.”

Beyond doing shows in a long list of places most people can’t even pronounce, this tour presented a few other pitfalls, says Camp. “One major challenge is a 30-foot thrust in front on the stage, with Jennifer singing into that headset mic 40-feet in front of the PA. It takes a whole lot of tooling to make sure the mic doesn’t feed back and I can get it as loud as I need. That was my major challenge. After that, everything else was a piece of cake.”

On the Horizon

After four months of international touring, Camp arrived home just in time to celebrate New Years. So what next? “This is my last long major tour,” states Camp. “I’m getting ready to launch Master Mix Live [mastermixlive.com], an audio engineering school, which is to open in March in Las Vegas. There won’t be any recording or English classes — Master Mix Live will focus on live sound and will only have eight students at a time, so everyone gets plenty of hands-on time.” That, and a chance to learn first--hand from a live mix master.